Twin 4-year-old boys were plucked from their blazing Long Island home yesterday by passing volunteer firefighters who scrambled up a ladder and broke into a smoke-choked bathroom, where the youngsters were lying unconscious on the floor.
Brothers Dante and Danté Burks were rushed to Nassau University Medical Center, where they were admitted in critical condition to the pediatric intensive care unit.
Both suffered smoke inhalation and first- and second-degree burns in the blaze that erupted at 1 p.m. at their home at 23 Park Place in Roosevelt, police said.
“It’s a miracle that those kids survived,” said neighbor Alfred Shepherd, a Roosevelt volunteer firefighter who had tried to enter the house, but was pushed back by thick billowing smoke.
Merrick volunteer firemen T. J. Fernandez and Ryan Cassidy – who had seen the smoke and started driving towards it – arrived minutes later.
“The mother was outside. She was frantic,” said Cassidy. “She was crying, ‘My babies are trapped inside! my babies are trapped inside!'”
The two grabbed a ladder and put it against the side of the building to get to the second-floor bathroom, where the anguished mom thought her sons might be.
Fernandez broke the bathroom window with his elbow and tried to find youngsters in the smoke-filled room.
“T.J. found one baby unconscious and passed him off to me … Then he found the second kid unconscious and I brought it down the ladder,” said Cassidy.
The blaze started in a second-floor den in the three-story wood-frame building, said Clifford Newman, Nassau’s supervising fire investigator. Its cause is still under investigation.
The boy’s mother, Brenda Rowe, 34, was in stable condition at Nassau University Medical Center, a spokeswoman said.